Kidney Transplants

Kidney transplants in humans have become the most highly developed and successful of the transplant operations. The research that preceded this dramatic achievement was pioneered by Dr. Joseph Murray, who performed the first successful human kidney transplant in 1954, in which a kidney was taken from one twin and given to another. Later, working with dogs, Dr. Murray and colleagues showed that transplants were also possible in unrelated people if drugs were taken to suppress the body's immune reaction to the transplant. He also showed that kidneys from fresh cadavers could be successfully transplanted into living patients.

The success of kidney transplantation was made possible in part by the availability of hemodialysis machines, which make it possible for patients with diseased kidneys to have their blood filtered and cleansed. While prolonging the lives of thousands of people suffering from kidney disease, this procedure is tedious, time-consuming and expensive.

A patient on dialysis requires more than 3 tons of cleansing fluid, injections, clamps, tubes, water softeners and medications each year! Each day, an average of 8 Canadians learn that their survival will depend on dialysis. Close to 10,000 Canadians now depend on dialysis.

Kidney transplantation, therefore, has become one of the most reliable and effective treatments for renal disease. More than 5,500 kidney transplants are performed in North America each year, and survival rates for both matched and cadaver kidney transplants are 90 percent or better. Worldwide, there have been over 400,000 successful kidney transplants performed. But the demand for organs is not matched by the number of donations: there are close to one thousand people in Ontario alone who are still waiting for a kidney transplant.